Halo 3 is a great game (see our review), and one of the major additions from Halo 2 is a level editor called “Forge.” This feature is a cool idea, but it’s somewhat flawed in its execution.The level editor doesn’t let you do all of the cool things that PC editors allow; basically, this just lets you change the furniture. So, you can fire up the editor and change the location of boxes, add guns to places they weren’t before. But you can’t change anything about the way the game is fundamentally played or make the level unrecognizable.

It’s still the same level; the box is just 10 feet over.

On a small scale, you can leave your mark on a map. You can set all the weapons to spawn faster, make all the weapons be of different than their defaults, and move a lot of the items around. You can delete items by pressing Y and add new items by pressing X and scrolling down. The bumpers let you fly over locations. The interface is fairly simple, which makes it a breeze to do all that you can do, but knowing what’s possible on the PC, you will probably feel like you can’t do anything.

Forge is best appreciated in multi-player, because you can play the game with other people and make changes as the game is going along. So, out of nowhere you could just spawn something cool and then jump into the game and grab it. By yourself, however, you’ll find it a fairly unsatisfying use of your time to do this instead of hanging out with your online friends or fragging some punks.

I like that Bungie wants to put the control in gamers’ hands, but I think the solution to the problem would be to somehow allow for a PC level editor to work with the game. That way, you could mod maps any way you wanted and make wholly new games–like Counter Strike was made. Unfortunately, the potential for cheating and the lengthy vetting process for getting content approved and added to Xbox Live probably means this will never happen.

Forge is not going to be a main selling point of the game; however, I don’t think it has the same level of polish as the other aspects of the game. It still looks as good and basically just is another feature of Halo 3. It’s just very barebones and feels tacked-on, whereas everything else seems well-crafted.